Land of the Uighurs

My nephew Denny and friend

It's been a week, now, since I returned from my trek -- with my nephew Denny -- through the Chinese Pamirs.  My experience was highly memorable, but it's a bit hard to pick a single theme about which to write.  So, let me just offer a few observations.

1.  Tension between the native Uighur population and the ruling Han Chinese remains high, but this tension is not obvious to the casual tourist.  Most of the people you see on the street are Uighurs.  All signs are written in both Chinese and in Uighur (using Arabic script).  Although China is said to be discouraging the practice of Islam, the central Mosque was full to overflowing for Friday prayers.  Merchants go about their normal business, and street scenes are lively.

2.  The Chinese love of order and discipline clashes with the chaos of Central Asian street life.  "Every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low: and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough places plain," is the Chinese mantra; you recognize Chinese urban planning from the air by a town's rigorous grid pattern.  The Chinese are the Imperial Romans of our time.

The Chinese thus instinctively abhor the winding narrow streets of Kashgar's old town.  The old quarters have been mainly bulldozed and replaced by broad streets with streetlights and trees, with a Uighur-esque gloss applied for atmosphere.  This is Uighur life as it is being presented to the tourists.  These newly rebuilt streets, with their outdoor cafe's under Parisian umbrellas, are certainly pleasant enough -- as are the similar streets of Samarkand and Tashkent -- but like the renovated town plans of those Uzbek cities, little of the romance and intrigue of the old town remains.  To see that, I arrived twenty years too late.

3.  The Chinese are coming.  The government has built blocks and blocks of still-empty apartment buildings, and huge shopping malls, standing empty without merchants.  The Chinese aren't stupid.  These buildings have been built to serve the hordes of Han Chinese who are being enticed to move to Kashgar (and Xinjiang in general) from eastern population centers by the offer of large financial incentives.  The Uighurs are about to be gentrified into insignificance -- or so, at least, is the plan.

4.  Most Americans just plain like Uighurs better than they like Han Chinese, apart from ideological or political concerns.  Marco Polo described the Uighurs as similar to his own Italians; other writers compare them to the Lebanese.  They are friendly, relaxed, good-natured, and eager to make a deal.  The Chinese, on the other hand, appear -- perhaps unfairly -- rigid, tense, and pushy, the product of crowded urban centers.

5.  Xinjiang is quickly becoming a fully accessible part of the world.  We traveled about eight hours south of Kashgar on the China-to-Pakistan Karakoram Highway, to reach our first campsite at Lake Karakul.  The trip should have taken five hours, but we were on gravel roads for a large percentage of the trip.  Our bus broke down about five times, and we were delayed at one point where the road had washed out and several vehicles had got stuck in the mud -- blocking us and a long line of commercial trucks from proceeding.  BUT -- the Chinese are rapidly improving the highway with long, aesthetically pleasing bridges that soar majestically across valleys.  The Karakoram Highway will soon allow travelers to complete the trip to the Pakistan border, driving on roads that meet modern freeway standards. "Every valley shall be exalted," indeed.

6.  This trek was almost certainly my last attempt at hiking much above 12,000 feet.  We were at 14 to 16 thousand feet during much of the trek, and I never adapted fully to the elevation.  The drug Diamox does an excellent job of preventing symptoms of acute mountain sickness, but it does not force oxygen through your lungs at low atmospheric pressure.  The hikes themselves were not difficult, had they been several thousand feet lower; but at my age the high ridge over which we climbed each day required more oxygen than I could force through my lungs.

7.  My basic axiom in choosing hikes remains confirmed -- the more difficult the hike, the more enjoyable your hiking companions.  As a result of some form of self-selection, the kind of people you hate to be around at close quarters for a week or more tend not to be interested in the more difficult hikes.  Somehow, I have to choose hikes in the future that give both this point and the prior point due consideration!

I could say much more, and may in the future.  It was a memorable trip, and once more reinforces my attraction to Central Asia.